Postlude

Summary

Having explored Unterweisung principles within Hindemith's music, we may observe that works written from his Berlin appointment (1927) onwards tend towards a greater conservatism. In the main, they use fewer and more standardised performance and expression markings, contain more regular and explicit quartal pitch collections, and are constructed with clearer compositional strategies and pre-conceived formal structures. These features may be further highlighted through comparison of his eclectic earlier style and post-1927 compositions, and in the revisions to his music written before, and yet revised after, the Unterweisung.

Such techniques are not wholly absent from Hindemith's early music, however. Even in his most dissonant and anti-structuralistic works, such as the Sonata for Solo Viola op. 25/1, Hindemith shows a concern for voiceleading. There are also explicit quartal pitch collections to be found, although they feature less prominently than in his post-theory works. Hindemith's early music, while highly abstract, liberal and instinctive, still contained traces of thought that could become the subject of theory. One could therefore suggest that his early style lent itself well to theoretical refinement.

One area of his early style that was almost entirely jettisoned after the Unterweisung was the octatonic scale. I find it surprising that Hindemith's use of this scale has not been fully investigated, given the interest it has generated in relation to the music of other leading composers such as Stravinsky and Bartók. Unlike Stravinsky, however, Hindemith does not draw upon a national heritage for the modes of his composition; rather, the presence of the octatonic scale in his early music is but one facet of his pluralistic borrowings.

Hindemith's emphasis on quartal pitch collections relates to prolongational characteristics that are neither tonal nor atonal, and which defy conventional categorisation. These prolongations are also implicitly referred to in the Unterweisung, particularly within the graphic analyses. Furthermore, Hindemith's quartal pitch collections, which are fully invertible, allowed him to perform the myriad of contrapuntal operations in the Ludus Tonalis. The potential of these collections may be related to his growing fondness for writing musical canons from the 1940s onwards; he wrote only one canon before the Unterweisung.